The great social engineering f lop

Billions spent, but poor miss out in university boom

THE billions of pounds s pent on expanding universities over the past 20 years has failed to help the poorest children, a study shows.

The failure of the comprehensive system was blamed for the stubbornly low proportion of undergraduates from disadvantaged backgrounds, according to researchers.

The boom in places has mainly benefited the middle classes, leaving behind an ‘underclass’, and indirectly precipitating social problems such as the disorder on our streets last summer.

Peter Elias, a Warwick University employment expert who helped lead the research, called on the Government to take urgent steps to improve social mobility. But he said attempts to engineer university admissions to favour poorer pupils were unworkable. The study, which covered 34,000 Britons, found that teenagers with whitecollar parents have taken up university places twice as fast as peers with blue-collar parents.

This is despite a widely publicised drive to boost the proportion of working-class youngsters in further education.

Professor Elias said the dramatic expansion of higher education from the early 1990s had widened the gaps between social groups. ‘There was an opportunity to do something, and it’s clearly been missed,’ he said.

‘Over the next three, four, five years we are going to need to make significant progress. If we don’t, the whole concept of the underclass is going to reappear.

‘We only need to look at what happened last summer to see what problems lie in wait if we have an unequal distribution across society.’

Professor Elias said reforms aimed at giving parents a wider choice of secondary schools including specialist schools, academies and free schools should help to boost social mobility. ‘ Some comprehensives are extremely good – and parents who pay for private education are wasting their money – but clearly some were failing,’ he said.

He said the lowering of university entry requirements for disadvantaged students was a ‘nightmare scenario’. Just as

‘Caught faking addresses’

some parents have been caught faking addresses to beat school catchment areas, there would be fake backgrounds in university admissions, he said.

‘If you try to translate these things i nto quota systems, straightaway people will try to get around the quota,’ he said.

‘You can have fake backgrounds – “my dad was a brickie and my mum a cleaner”. It’s unworkable administratively and politically undesirable.’ The rise in tuition fees and abolition of grants for poor college students could prove a ‘huge obstacle’ to boosting social mobility, he added.

The study by the Institute of Social and Economic Research based at Essex University analysed two groups of adults – one aged 22 to 34 and the other 37 to 49. The older group would have been able to attend university prior to the expansion that began in 1992.

Of these 25.7 per cent had a degree – a figure that rose to 34.3 per cent among the younger group. When the researchers examined the backgrounds of the graduates, they found stark differences.

The rise among teenagers with managerial and professional parents was ten percentage points. Among intermediate occupations, including clerical jobs, nursing and directors of small businesses, it was 11 points.

But among families with routine or manual jobs the rise was only five points.